Cafe 911

I was in a dim living room which had a sliding glass door out into a pool area. I opened the door and walked out, past some tables and a crowd of people sitting out there. A man started yelling about the fact that I'd interrupted their gathering--but his ire was directed at a person who had been inside with me.

angry man: "What's this fool doing out here?"

person inside: "He didn't know he wasn't supposed to be out there."

angry man: "It doesn't matter, this is inexcusable, I'm going to have words with your uncle."

me: "Look, I'm sorry, whatever..."

Dizzily going back inside and shutting the door, I bumped into a small wooden boat that had been leaning against a wall. I tried to put it back, but it fell again and broke. I was upset and wanted to wake up; an old man with foreign accent stopped me.

me: "Aaaa! Undo! Undo!"

old man: "This iz nothing to be concernt over. It iz just wood."

I became more lucid about the situation and started to notice that something strange was happening to all the rectangular objects in the room. They were rotating freely in 3-D, very slowly; e.g. picture frames flipping off of the wall. There were two axes of rotation--some objects were going straight toward the pool table, while objects on the side walls rotated toward the floor.

Though the objects seemed to pass freely through walls, I could grab and hold onto them. I could stop the objects but I could feel the forces causing them to turn. I carried one across a line into another part of the house, where I found the objects were flipping in the other direction Out a window I could see people grabbing the objects frantically...I couldn't tell if they were playing excitedly or freaking out.

The next thing I knew I was on a bed talking with a black woman and a white man, both were oldish-looking.

woman: "You are getting close to the end, but there's another 30-year slot to load."

me: "What do you mean by another 30-year slot?"

woman: "Each life teaches. You say as much, about the transition from being a child to being an adult, but there are many more ways to see those changes without going strictly 'up'. There is something to be absorbed by living the life of a poor creature that has never felt a moment of power in their lives...no matter how sad that is..."

She began to cry, and her face seemed to distort a bit into an alien fish head, like Admiral Akbar from Star Wars. Then it wavered back.

me: "Is there any alternative to going through these slots?"

woman: "Of course. You can pull out completely, then you're absolutely nobody... you're only God."

me: "What is that like?"

man: (laughing) "When you're God, you spend most of your time trying to duck out of being interviewed. You tell people here that you're in Japan...and the people in Japan that you're here..."

I began to feel pinches on my body, it seemed that some more people were on the bed, I was naked.

She started to perform oral sex on me in an unusual way that tickled, it made me laugh and I pushed away due to the situational awkwardness.

me: "Yes, better, but... say, you've been morphing. Can you look like anything you want?"

woman: "You mean like this?"

The woman stood up and started to flip through various appearances. She stopped at a white girl with very short curly hair who was holding a parasol and wearing stockings (an old-style looking pin-up). The man nodded in approval. I made 'meh' noises and tried to feedback into the process to get something I liked better but she seemed to have decided and sat back down.

me: "Can all of you do that?"

man: (grimacing) "Not everyone, but too many shapeshifters have been authorized these days, and security is going to hell at Citadel because of it. There's someone in particular...we need you to look at him closely...he's called Gordon."

He pulled out a photo and showed it to me. It looked like a man's face in a welding mask, but with a water hose spigot fused over the right eye. The photo turned into the actual mask and we turned it around to see a connection of metal piping and tubing from the inside.

woman: "We need to know if you can cut any of these connections."

Things became fuzzy as there was a lot of drilling and welding-type stuff trying to tear up the pipes, and I had to get up. When I did, I got some context for where we had been; the bed was on the ground in what seemed like a restaurant with many more such beds in areas sectioned off. I dizzily walked past some young Asian greeters who were standing at a podium and turned around to see the place from the outside.

The place seemed to be called something like "Cafe 911" and there were some possibly-meant-to-be humorous advertising e.g. "If you're on the Eastside, go eat at [...], it's better! But if you have to be here, Cafe 911 is good enough for now."

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The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the
words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction
—in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to
be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be
crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less
disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?